I have couple of more pointers and opinions to chime in with here:

1) There is adjustments to be made regarding the dynamic described on deep stack play against aggro regs. Even though i personally believe the focus on that battle can wait until you have a bigger roll and/or developed your game more, but anyway. For example tightening your range when you involve yourself in a hand with them, so that alot of your continuerange will in reality be impossible to bluff you off your hand for your villains. Even though they will still think they can bluff you,big parts of your continuerange if done properly cant be bluffed by them. Manipulating your range that way can be an extremely powerful tool, and is an adjustment i have used to own several overaggro LAGs who think they can push me around by just blindly firing multiple barrells. It got to a point where one of them said to me in frustration after he once again unsuccessfully tried to barrell me off my hand: "Petrucci, youre winning money from me each ****ing session and you are probably the only one i cant win anything from".

Its about readjusting, and in my experience if you do it correctly your opponents have really big problems catching up to the adjustments youre making. Suddenly _you_ are exploiting them instead of the oposite.


2) Building a bankroll from scratch or close to scratch has its purposes. Its a process that make your grow in all aspect of your game and often also as a person. If a big bankroll comes to easy in your hands (bink a tournament or get a big money gifth from grand parents or whatever) it can be a double edged sword. You may have the money, but youre not there skillwise yet or youre not there yet mentally. You need to learn to not think about the money, you need to only care about executing the most +EV play or maximum exploitation. The only way to really do this is time, volume and slowly working your way up the ladder.

If you have to work freaking hard to build a bankroll up, you will learn so much valuable along the way wich is all part of the big process. Another example of that is you will learn that money/bankroll takes hard work to get your hands onto. If you just show up friday night and bink a tournament for like 10 K$ you wont learn that. What will happen is there will be a gap between your financial state, and other (important) parts of the puzzle. Moneywise you will have a roll right, but your skills and mental developement isnt there yet.

Wise words Petrucci. Appreciate it. You are absolutely right, a sizeable bankroll is only any use in the hands of a player who recognises it's value, knows how to use it and has developed the mental fortitude to weather the inevitable horrors the game throws at them.

I guess it's a special case of it being about the journey and not the destination.

I'm into weight lifting too. Arnie says he thinks of everything in terms of reps. You do enough reps with enough intensity and you inevitably improve. Practice makes perfect.

I'm going to ignore the money and focus on putting in the hours of quality play required to progress my game.

I feel pretty fired up now after feeling very despondent yesterday. I can't tell you all how important this forum and all your help has been to me. Thanks guys!

This is way off ime.

I see fish stack off deep lightly all the time. They are unable to understand absolute vs relative hand strength and what hands are okay to stack off with on certain board textures at deeper stack depths. This is especially the case with overpairs.

Exactly. The Arnold analogy regarding lifting weights are a good one. There is no shortcuts when it comes to arriving at the final destination (whatever that is though). Youre not becoming a skilled experienced player just because you bink a donkament for 10k$ or your grandmother hands you 5k$. Its a longtime process wich requires hard work and effort, hours after hours. Its about failing, its about making mistakes,its about challenging your fears- but even so continue to get up on the horse.

Glad you got something out of it, pleasure is on my side. If you feel the need for some deeper elaboration on certain topics, or have more questions just fire it up.

100% this. I refer to that as "psychological bankroll." Money-wise, I am overrolled for 2/5 at this point, but since it doesn't run here, I only get to play it when I'm traveling. When I do get to play it, I tend to be either a bit scared money, or, more commonly, a bit over-aggro as I over-react and force myself not to be scared money to the point that I'm almost spewy.

This has become a much smaller problem as my local game is 1/3 and often gets quite deep, but it's not because my bankroll has grown so much. I was already plenty rolled for 2/5 before I moved here. It's just because I am used to bigger swings now. The BI is capped at $300, though, so I have to double up before I am playing at $2/5 stacks, and if felted will only be putting $300 more on the table, so "big loss" sessions are still rather small by 2/5 standards, and I still get depressed if I lose $1K in a session.

I love playing with decent to good players who are uncomfortable with the amount of money in front of them. Find a hand with decent equity against their range (AK pre flop, flush draw or OESD on the flop), shove or make a committing raise on top of their bet and profit. A lot of people do NOT want to flip for big stacks even with a reasonable amount of dead money out there or they're slightly ahead. Of course, this only works if the player has a fold button and you make your move before they've put enough in the pot to feel completely committed, so better pre flop or flop than turn.

People who play this style always give me trouble. The regs I struggle with play a tight range, but once they enter a pot they're very sticky and betting large enough to price out draws.

Yeah, because theire not so unbalanced in their ranges that many of the fish/rec players are. When they call a flopraise for example, they probably arent calling the flopraise only to fold to further aggression on the turn/river. They know whats coming, and is planning the hand ahead.

Thats the key of the bolded part you quoted from me to, manipulate your continuerange any street but flop/turn particulary so that the aggro reg thats used to bluff you drives straight into the wall. In all the spots he used to gets fold cause your range consists of too many call one street/fold the next street marginal type of hands, you have pimped your range so you can handle what you know is coming regardless: multiple barrells.

Which is basically a cooler, and you're just as likely to be on the good side versus the bad side as they are.

Regarding your "what to do when doubling up" question, does your room offer multiple tables of the same stake (where you keep your chips when table changing)? What I often do after doubling up and then becoming a deeper stack at a table full of deeper stacks is to move to a table (of the same stakes) that simply has shorter stacks / less deeper stacks / less good players on deeper stacks.

GgoodluckG


Then our experiences differ.

GcluelessNLnoobG

I agree with Dizzy, see this all the time. There are several people I play with that I will basically never sit with a smaller stack than (game is uncapped) because you're giving away money.

Agreed it's game dependent though. If people aren't stacking off 200 BBS deep without the nuts, then there's not much value in covering fish.

It's not a cooler when they stack off with strong absolute strength hands that have weak relative value based on the board texture/action/stack depth.

We're not talking about set-over-set / true coolers here - but spots where the fish will get stacked by us but we wouldn't get stacked if the situations were reversed.

yeah, fair enough then (just gotta add mandatory comment about your image making it so no one will ever stack off light to you)

Bolded is pretty important/relevant in this context, so good comment

As I've stated before (can't recall if it's this thread or another one?) it has zero to do with my image. It's not that I don't see people stacking off 300+bb (or even 200bb+) stacks to me (which with my nit image would be perfectly fair enough): it's that I don't see it *at all* between *anybody* (other than hands involving mega maniacs).

Gourgamesobviouslydiffer,whichisfairenoughG

Looks like this got lost in the most recent discussion. Very nice results man


I wasn't even necessarily talking about getting in 300bb+ stacks light this time; I thought the discussion was more between buying in for 70-100bb vs 150-200bb

You can't bluff someone who won't put $ in the pot. that was my point.

You can win a lot of small pots. At the very least you can win the blinds often (which adds up, but you dont notice.

Most games are loose preflop, and if they never stack off light postflop, you can barrel literally non stop and win at a crazy rate, until they adjust. These are probably the easiest type of game because blind aggression just works (with some common sense)

Quick update: I actually sat down at the 1/1 tables and discovered that rake isn't as bad as I thought. It is 10% but capped at £5 not £10. The small pots are more expensive than 1/2 but you actually save some rake on any pot over £100.

There aren't as many deepstacks as at 1/2 and they aren't as tricky. I can therefore sit deep after I double up or more and keep picking off 50-100bb stacks without needing to table change too often.

After two sessions totalling 12 hours I've won £643 so the vast bulk of what I lost in my last 1/2 session is back in my BR though sone judicious table selectionary and a good bit of run-hot. Roll feels much more comfortable in the 1/1 game. I feel I have space to make mistakes and learn from them now without busting out and my game is already better for it.

Roll: £2,585
Buyins @ £70 for 1/1: 36.9
Buying @ £140 for 1/2: 18.5
Total time played at 1/2 and 1/1: 108hrs
Win rate: £24/hr

So thanks again all of you for helping get me refocused on what's important. I honestly think if I hadn't sought and received good feedback on here I'd have quickly blown the rest of my roll trying to take on deepstack regs in the 1/2 game.

Hope you've all had a good weekend too.

Excellent news Ragequit, happy for you and good news on the latest update. Seems from what youre telling us that you have popped on a lightbulb or 3, and thats nice to see Keep it up and focus on the right things, and both your game and your roll will grow.

And dont worry at all: the time to take on the 1/2 deepstack regs will come. But do it when it feels natural and the time is right- and from my point of view+ experience you will know deep down when the time is there to take the step.

Thanks! Though I'm a lady


(jumping in on the general 300bb stackoff light discussion)
The buyin for my game is 200bb and I make so much money 300bb deep - some random examples, had a guy jam 800 into a 1600 pot with a low overpair trying to get me to fold my overpair after calling me down to the river, the 900bb pot I won 3 ways with top set versus two overpairs, the hand I posted last week where a guy bets $420 into $1600 with 89o on K72TT (I lost this one cause I folded but I was far at the bottom of the range and am able to call enough that I consider the hand a win).

It is super standard to see good players in my 2/5 game go for 3 streets / 200bb all in in 3bet pots with overpairs, and they get paid and win usually.

Where do you play?

Not that I will go there, just curious

i'll get May results started

funny thing is i switched back to Poker Income and had my best winning month in awhile

I have $2440 of all my savings at current moment. Do i buy in 100bb or max 250bb if in case I dropped 5bi then I stop? 1/2 live game btw, consider myself TAG player. A night I can win up to $570, two nights I could lose $200+500 , in some sense value bet too thin against loose fish, and he shown me 2 pair

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In your case easily 100bb.

Your bankroll is not all the money you have. It's all the money you can lose and not be affected. If you only have $2400 and buy in for $500, then if you drop to $500 you will be afraid to gamble because you're on your last buyin, and then at $1000 you will be afraid because if you lose just one more buyin you'll be on your last one, and so on.

Basically, you have less money than you think.

With 100bb we can overbet n not afraid of losing 1bi denying villain equity while with 250bb holding AK u may not know what to do against a 4b. Is that what u mean?

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Kind of. But there are much more common spots than that, where the clearly most profitable line is also risky. Not worrying about money is really important in poker.

Here's a hand I played a couple of weeks ago as an example.

Usually this is an easy flop raise and turn shove because I don't think this player folds Tx. Maybe they even get sticky with a pocket pair. Sure he has 8x some of the time and I get stacked but it's still a clear value raise.

But as it happens I did not bring a full clip to the poker room that day and had already lost my first buyin. I was playing with the last of my pocket money and I'd have to leave this great game if I busted.

So I took a really passive line and left a few hundred dollars in value behind. Because I couldn't afford to lose, I lost money. Don't do that.